SUBJECT AND TOPIC: A NEW TYPOLOGY OF LANGUAGE*
by
Charles N. Li
Sandra A. Thompson
*This paper is an amalgamation of three earlier papers and renders them obsolete: (1) "Chinese as a Topic-Prominent Language," prepared and circulated for the 7th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, October, 1974; (2) "Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language," presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, New York, December, 1974; (3) "Evidence Against Topicalization in Topic-Prominent Languages," circulated prior to the Symposium on Subject and Topic. We are grateful to the participants of the Symposium and to James H-Y Tai for their valuable comments and to Dr. Edward Hope, who responded from Bangkok to our inquiries about a number of Lisu constructions. During the preparation of this paper, Charles N. Li was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
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I. Introduction.
Since the emergence of descriptive linguistics, linguists have disagreed among themselves over the question of the extent to which languages could be expected to differ from one another. The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for a typology based on the grammatical relations subject-predicate and topic-comment. The notion of subject has long been considered a basic grammatical relation in the sentential structure of a language. However, the evidence we have gathered from certain languages suggests that in these languages the basic constructions manifest a topic-comment relation rather than a subject-predicate relation. This evidence shows not only that the notion of topic may be as basic as that of subject in grammatical descriptions, but also that languages may differ in their strategies in construction sentences according to the prominence of the notions of topic and subject. According to our study, there are four basic types of languages: (i) languages that are subject-prominent (a term introduced by E.L. Keenan); (ii) languages that are topic-prominent; (iii) languages that are both subject-prominent and topic-prominent; (iv) languages that are neither subject-prominent nor topic-prominent. In subject-prominent (Sp) languages, the structure of sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation subject-predicate plays a major role; in topic-prominent (Tp) languages, the basic structure of sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation topic-comment plays a major role. In type (iii) languages, there are two equally important distinct sentence constructions, the subject-predicate construction and the topic-comment construction; in type (iv) languages, the subject and the topic have merged and are no longer distinguishable in all sentence types. In order to clarify the subject-predicate construction and the topic-comment construction, we may use two types of English sentences as examples:
In Sp languages, the basic sentence structure is similar to 1, whereas in Tp languages, the basic sentence structure is similar to 2. However, this is not to say that in Tp languages, one cannot identify subjects, or that Sp languages do not have topics. In fact, all the languages we have investigated have the topic-comment construction, and although not all languages have the subject-predicate construction, there appear to be ways of identifying subjects in most Tp languages.
1 John hit Mary. Subject Predicate
2 As for education, John prefers Bertrand Russell's ideas. Topic Comment p. 460
Our typological claim will simply be that some languages can be more insightfully described by taking the concept of topic to be basic, while others can be more insightfully described by taking the notion of subject as basic. This is due to the fact that many structural phenomena of a language can be explained on the basis of whether the basic structure of its sentences is analyzed as subject-predicate or topic-comment. According to a number of criteria which we will outline below, and a small sample of languages which we have investigated, the following typological table may be established.
It is obvious that the above table touches on only a very small number of languages in the world. This is partly due to the fact that in order to establish topic-prominence, a careful investigation of the syntactic structures of a language is necessary. Since the tradition in linguistic studies emphasizes the subject as the basic, universal grammatical relation, grammarians tend to assume that sentences of a language are naturally structured in terms of subject, object, and verb. In general, it is not considered that the basic structure of a sentence could be described in terms of topic and comment.1 There are exceptions. For example, Schachter and Otanes (1972) stated that the Tagalog basic
Subject-Prominent Languages Topic-Prominent Languages Indo-European Chinese Niger-Congo Lahu (Lolo- Burmese) Finno-Ugric Lisu (Lolo-Burmese) Simitic : Dyirbal (Australian) : Indonesian Malagasy :
:
Subject-Prominent and Topic-Prominent Languages Neither Subject-Prominent nor Topic-Prominent Languages Japanese Tagalog Korean Illocano :
::
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sentence structure should not be described in terms of the notion subject Another example is E. Hope (1974) who has described a remarkable Tp language, Lisu, a Lolo-Burmese language. But in general, it is often difficult to determine the typology of a language in terms of subject-prominence and topic-prominence on the basis of reference grammars since many such grammars are biased toward the subject-predicate analysis. Modern generative linguistics does not represent any advance in this particular area. The assumption remains that the basic sentence structure should be universally described in terms of subject, object, and verb. Our goal in this paper is, therefore, a modest one: we wish to establish the value and the validity of a typology based on the notions of subject-prominence and topic-prominence. We will proceed as follows. First, we will outline the differences between subjects and topics in terms of a number of properties which they do not share; then we will discuss some of the characteristics of Tp languages. We will then show that the topic-comment structure in Tp languages is indeed a basic sentence type, and finally we will explain the implications of the typology for the study of universal grammar.
*Charles N. Li & Sandra A. Thompson. 1976. "Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language." In: Charles N. Li (ed.). Subject and Topic. London /New York: Academic Press, pp. 457-61.